ARLINGTON, Texas — Andrew Tinnish liked plenty about Fernando Perez as he reviewed the video captured by Nicaragua area scout Daniel Sotelo leading into the 2022 international signing period. The then 17-year-old righty stood six-foot-three, with a lean athletic frame, moved well through his delivery, repeated well, threw strikes and spun the ball a little — advanced stuff, especially for someone so off the beaten path.
All of that really stuck out for the Toronto Blue Jays’ vice-president international scouting and baseball operations, but that was far from the most memorable part of the video.
“I can’t even describe it,” says Tinnish. “There’s no fence in the outfield. It’s almost like a pasture. And it’s this crappy old mound, in the middle of a field, some trees in the back and there’s something running around in centre field. I’m like, ‘What is that? Are those goats?’”
Yup, those sure were goats, roaming around the random patch during a game organized as part of a tryout near the southwestern Nicaraguan town of Rivas, where Perez is from. During his decade in the international market, Tinnish has seen more than his share of makeshift fields across Latin America, but never before one with goats moving through the outfield, with the pitcher on the mound, during play.
“With no fence,” he explains, “you can’t stop them.”
Clearly not, but the Blue Jays weren’t deterred, promptly signing Perez — who also worked out for the Yankees, Red Sox, Giants and Royals — for a $10,000 bonus. And as the now 20-year-old has progressed through the system, making major gains this season at low-A Dunedin to be selected for Saturday’s Futures Game, the combination of his developmental strides and that video led to a small handful of people in the front office and pitching group to nickname him The GOAT.
“I’ll get a text every once in a while, like, ‘Hey, see The GOAT’s outing today?’ or ‘The GOAT‘s going to the Futures Game,” Tinnish says of the play on the acronym for ‘Greatest Of All Time’ used frequently in best-ever sports debates. “It’s a combination of him doing really well, throwing a ton of strikes and the goats running around in his scouting video.”
Before allowing a Drake Baldwin solo shot in an otherwise clean inning during the American League’s 6-1 loss to the National League, Perez laughs at the memory of that fateful tryout.
He’d picked up baseball as an eight-year-old, played it on the streets of Rivas, home to former Rays and Mariners righty Erasmo Ramirez, realized at 13 that as a hitter, “I didn’t have a chance,” switched to pitching, made progress, and made pursuit of the big-leagues a goal. When he signed, “my family got really excited, I got really excited.”
The juxtaposition between that open field and the palatial Globe Life Field underlined how far he’s come in 2½ short years.
“When I got here to the Blue Jays everything was so different,” he says through interpreter Yoel Hernandez, the bullpen coach in Dunedin who was also the pitching coach of the Blue Jays’ Dominican Summer League team in 2022 when Perez first arrived. “At home I didn’t go to the gym or didn’t do any of the stuff I was doing here. There was a lot of new stuff for me.
“It’s a day and night change. I’ve developed a lot.”
Very much so, this season leveraging his strike-throwing ability and improving velocity — he’s sitting 92-93 now, up from 86-88 when he was signed — to log 75 innings across 14 starts for Dunedin, with a 3.48 ERA, 1.013 WHIP, 81 strikeouts and 4.05 strikeout/walk rate.
In that way, he’s becoming the type of development story the Blue Jays desperately need more of, especially during a season in which fellow pitching prospects Brandon Barriera and Landon Maroudis have undergone the hybrid Tommy John and internal brace surgery, and Ricky Tiedemann and Adam Macko both shut down with forearm issues.
Perez’s progress is also important because the Blue Jays, typically, don’t spend big on pitchers in the international market due to the degree of risk around arms as young as 16, making the organization’s spotty draft record in recent years all the more problematic.
The jury is still out on their biggest international pitching investments in recent years — Eric Pardinho signed for $1.4 million in 2017 and is trending well as a reliever at triple-A Buffalo after years of injuries; Yosver Zulueta signed for $1 million in 2019 and debuted with the Reds this season; and Alejandro Melean signed for $775,000 in 2017 and is at double-A New Hampshire.
But they’ve created value with some smaller signs like Kendrys Rojas ($215,000 in 2020), Dahian Santos ($150,000 in 2019), Sem Robberse ($125,000), Max Castillo ($10,000 in 2016) and Perez, providing a bit of depth to a system in need of some.
Whether Perez becomes more than that is on him, but the ingredients are there for him to develop much further, especially with his work ethic.
That’s among the most difficult ingredients to measure before signing an international player or selecting someone in the draft, because until someone is really tested, “it’s so hard to really tell what level of resilience does this kid have, or self-drive,” says Tinnish. “To become a professional, you obviously have to be some level of hard-worker. But you don’t know at that point if he separates himself in that area.”
Hernandez saw Perez do just that during their first year together in the Dominican.
The coach, who pitched for the Phillies in 2007 as part of a 16-year pro career, immediately began to focus on improving the right-hander’s fundamentals to make gains in commands and movement.
“His arm action when he got there, in my opinion, wasn’t great so we started working on it and working on it and he got better at it,” he says. “After about the first half of the season, I could see that everything was sinking, he was throwing more strikes, the arm action started looking better. It was a lot of work that he did.”
Two years later, Hernandez was there when Dunedin manager Jose Mayorga recently gathered up his players for their regular After Game Review, or AGR, and afterwards told the group there was some good news to share.
“He said, ‘There’s a pitcher here that the work he’s put in the past two months has paid off,’ and let me know I’d been selected,” Perez recalls. “I wasn’t expecting that, I got really excited, I got pumped that day. I didn’t know what to do, but I was really excited.”
As are the Blue Jays, who don’t need Perez to be a GOAT, just the pitcher he’s growing into now that he’s no longer sharing a field with one.